The Senate approved a short-term funding bill for the federal government late Wednesday night, averting a potential shutdown at the end of the week while pushing the next funding deadline into early 2024. Initially passed by the House on Tuesday, the bill now goes to the White House, where President Joe Biden is expected to sign it before a midnight deadline Friday.
The bill passed easily in an 87-11 vote, with 10 Republicans and one Democrat voting against it. The lone Democrat holdout, Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, said he opposed the bill because it failed to include aid for Ukraine.
As we told you earlier this week, the stopgap bill creates two new deadlines early next year, with some departments receiving funding until January 19 and others until February 2 – effectively creating two new shutdown threats. The bill is also “clean,” meaning it includes no amendments addressing divisive issues such as foreign aid and makes no cuts in spending, and instead extends current spending levels into early 2024.
Although conservatives in the House pushed to include funding cuts and policy provisions in the bill, the fact that the bill avoided those issues was a crucial factor in winning bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer applauded lawmakers’ willingness to work together and leave aside controversial issues that threatened to derail the effort. “Because of bipartisan cooperation, we are keeping the government open without any poison pills or harmful cuts to vital programs — a great outcome for the American people,” he said. “If the speaker is willing to work with Democrats and resist the siren song of the hard right in the House,” he added, “then we can avoid shutdowns in the future and finish the work of funding the government.”
The clock is ticking: The stopgap bill removes the immediate threat of a shutdown and provides the promise of an unusually quiet holiday break for Congress, but it also kicks the funding can down a road that is both short and bumpy. While early January may seem reasonably far away, the holiday pileup at the end of the year means there are precious few legislative days left before the new deadlines arrive, leaving little time to deal with a whole host of serious issues.
Perhaps the most pressing issue will be avoiding a partial shutdown in mid-January, and another in early February. Lawmakers will have to either reach their goal of passing full-year funding bills through both the House and Senate or come up with another stopgap bill – with the latter option already being discounted by House Speaker Mike Johnson. Either path offers a whole host of potential obstacles, and even if the House can manage to pass all 12 of its annual spending bills in the coming weeks, they will likely run into opposition in the Senate, requiring long and difficult negotiations to hammer into acceptable form.